Sunday 31st May 2015 @ 4:00 AM

Got a couple of ghosts here this week because it is… international ghost day? Yeah, that sounds plausible enough.

The Ghost Warden

People who knew him disagreed about whether or not Warden Gagnon was a good man. He was a successful man, a good citizen, but he was cruel. His cruelty, however, was directed at the prisoners of the prison he ran, so many people accepted it. He had no interest in rehabilitation, but loved punishment. He was never willing to kill a prisoner, because dead men don’t learn lessons, but any torture he could devise short of that was fair game. Still, like a large number of people in history, Gagnon died. Perhaps the debate over Gagnon’s goodness carried over into the afterlife, because it seems that neither heaven nor hell accepted the man’s soul.

For more than a century, the Ghost Warden has continued to watch his prison. Escapees are tracked by the righteous spectre and those who dare to attempt to commit murder within its walls are attacked and beaten. It could seem that he is simply carrying on the severe imprisoning techniques of his life, if it weren’t for the fact that any corruption among the guards is met with the same punishment. Could Gagnon be trying to make up for his life choices? And if so, does that mean his soul is now a prisoner in the very prison he once ruled with an iron fist?

The Bleeding Child

The ghost of the Bleeding Child had been seen for years by guests in the hotel. Late at night, when alone in a hallway, hotel guests would feel uneasy, like they were being watched. Looking around, they might catch a glimpse of a young boy. If they investigated any further, it was a regular jump scare situation, with the child lunging at them, his bloody wounds now visible, and suddenly vanishing. This went on for some time, word got out into the types of circles that talk about that sort of thing, and a documentary crew began investigating. They could not find any stories in the hotel’s history that might explain the events. No missing children or tragic cult rituals or anything were on record, or even rumored to be off record. Eventually the investigators just decided to take their cameras into the hotel for a few nights and see what happens. What happened next was a mystery, but maybe someday their footage will be found.

Obviously I’m trying to make a found footage plot here. If I ever told the story for real, I’d go places unexpected and weird, but for now this’ll do.

Sunday 11th January 2015 @ 6:29 PM

Kwally

Kwally is a being of pure mystical energy that runs a club for wizards. Originally having been created by a wizard in a distant mystical realm, Kwally wandered the cosmos for untold years before deciding that wandering was exactly what it did not want. Kwally wanted stability, a permanent address. With that in mind, Kwally created a pocket universe that contains only the interior of its clubhouse. Kwally lives there now, and has not once left since.

Though sedentary, Kwally is not asocial. Any being capable of find their way to Kwally’s door will be met with a hearty welcome. In this way Kwally has met a lot of wizards, and become something of a hub for their social scene. Beings from all manner of strange places come to Kwally’s to hang out. But if any misbehave, Kwally is powerful enough to make them regret it.

Kwally is a character design (name included) that I found on a scrap of paper dating way way back, but I didn’t have a story for it. I don’t think I lost the story, I just think I never bothered to make one. Well, here you go, Kwally.

Gogo

Gogo is a gorilla ghost.

Gogo was born in a zoo, but wound up as part of a research study with some other apes. The researchers tried to teach the apes to read, with varying degrees of success. Gogo, it seemed, was the least successful. Compared to her fellows, Gogo struggled to read English. But the other apes were so successful that the researchers gained notoriety, and the apes were given a number of books as donations from a charitable public.

Somehow, whether by mistake or by some sinister purpose, a book of occult knowledge came in among the gifts. With large sections of the book not in English, but in some apparent gibberish, the other apes cast the book aside. Gogo, however, had a natural knack for strange ritualistic language of the book and kept it to herself, learning secrets of the universe that even her human masters did not know. Before long, she rebelled against her captors, killing the other apes, as well as some of the researchers, before being shot dead. But with her knowledge, death was not the end for Gogo, it was merely a means of escape.

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 @ 9:46 PM

Okay, today I’m going to do something a little different: I consider the Venture Bros to probably be my favorite thing on television these days, so sometimes I like to read about it on the Internet. Now, I’m getting into a pretty big spoiler for the show here (though, one from the start of the second season and that was like forever ago), but I want to offer my own thoughts on the topic of the titular brothers, Hank and Dean, being clones. The idea is that the boys are so death-prone that their Super Scientist father has clones of them ready to go when needed and the boys’ beds record their minds as they sleep, so that the clones will have their memories. Simple enough. What I want to talk about today is… well, I occasionally see people on the Internet talking as though the fact that the Hank and Dean of today are cloned from the original Hank and Dean, it somehow means that these are not the “real” Hank and Dean, that they are, in fact different people who just happen to have the appearance and memories (in fact, Dean himself is going through a sort of existential crisis about that in the show as of this writing). So, in the interests of amassing evidence to argue against people who will never, ever see this website, here I will present my case:

Point I) In the universe of the Venture Bros, souls and the afterlife are confirmed to exist. Dr. Byron Orpheus, friend of the Venture family, is an accomplished necromancer and all manner of ghosts have been encountered (Abraham Lincoln in Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner, Major Tom in Ghosts of the Sargasso, and a Native American tribe in Assassinanny 911, for examples). Knowing that the soul, in that world, is an actual thing, we would kind of have to say that who a person is would be defined by their soul.

Point II) The current clones of Hank and Dean have the souls of the previous incarnations. In the episode Powerless in the Face of Death, the episode that reveals the clonal nature of the boys, Orpheus travels to the afterlife in search of the boys’ souls and finds that their souls are not there. Continuing his search for the souls he comes to Dr. Venture’s lab, where he senses the souls within the machinery that Doc uses to record the boy’s memories. While Doc doesn’t believe in using the supernatural designation of “soul” preferring to think of it as just the boy’s “memory synapses,” but Orpheus is the expert in the supernatural and he says the souls are in there. It seems that one’s soul goes where a person’s “memories, hopes, and dreams” goes, and that’s what Doc has on store. Thus, with this information fed into the boys clone slugs every time they die, they are in essence carrying their soul with them.

To further my case, I point to The Family That Slays Together Part One, in which Hank notes that he “I jumped off my roof in a Batman costume. I think. I might have just dreamt it.” That was one of the ways that Hank died. Hank remembers this though it was probably not something that would have been recorded by his bed, and that indicates to me that he has carried a bit of memory from a previous body to his new one. It is especially worth noting that the ghost of Abraham Lincoln was only able to affect the physical world through objects that bore his image (statues, paintings, money, etc.). For the souls of Hank and Dean, their own cloned bodies would be a perfect fit.

To me, it looks like this: When the boys die, their soul goes to those Earthly things that most connect them to the world, their memories in Doc’s machinery, and then on into the clone slugs. That continuity of soul would mean that the clones of Hank and Dean now present are as much Hank and Dean as any Hank and Dean that ever came before. I fully agree that if we took a clone and let it live without downloading the souls into it, it would be a new person (look at D-19, the rejected Dean clone from Perchance to Dean). But the Hank and Dean of Season Four are still the Hank and Dean of Season One (and the dozen Hanks and Deans that died before that).

Tuesday 27th September 2011 @ 2:59 AM

At some point in the past I noticed that the daily Archie comic strip seems to feature more scenes of the teachers in the school cafeteria than the students in the cafeteria. For no good reason, I decided to test my hypothesis by watching the strip in 2011 to see if it remained true. But then the artist on the strip changed about a few months into the year and there just hasn’t been that many strips in the cafeteria at all. Plus, when I realized I was paying close enough attention to the Archie comic strip to notice the change of artist, I figured I was getting too invested in it. And then Chron.com, which I use to read comic strips online, underwent some remodeling and I missed a couple weeks and I honestly did not feel like going back through to see if I’d missed any important information (plus the links to the strips I’d gathered no longer worked). So I aborted my experiment.

But here is the information I did collect:

January 11th: Teachers in Cafeteria.
January 13th: Teachers in Cafeteria.
January 20th: Teachers in Cafeteria.
April 29th: Nobody in Cafeteria, but they talk about it.
May 12th: Teachers in Cafeteria.

I think that my hypothesis would have been proven correct. What I should have done is go through all the 2010 strips. But I ain’t gonna.

Haiku!

Sometimes people die.
This is because ghosts need us
to be their new friends.

I got rid of twenty of my books today. That’s something I usually don’t do. For the past year and a bit I have been trying to rid myself of all sorts of my belongings. Chairs and desks I have cast aside. Abut half of my clothes were given away. But books (and comics and DVDs) I am obsessed with and they are the only things that have continued coming in more than going out. I hang on to my books forever, generally. But by trimming twenty of the books I figured I probably wouldn’t ever read again, I have gained a little bit of shelf space. Twenty books doesn’t even make a dent in my collection, really, but it feels like a lot.

That said, I’ll probably have more than twenty new books well before this time next year.